Sunday, December 12, 2010

Last December we spoke to several kickers regarding kicking in the cold. It's December once again, and kicking in winter weather is once again in the news. Several articles from this past week all focused on the topic.

"It's a little harder to kick kickoffs five or six yards deep into the end zone at Soldier Field when it's 10 degrees out. It's an adjustment, it really is," Gould said Wednesday. "You've got to hang the ball up a little bit more and know that it is going to be shorter. And as a team we have to cover the ball and make sure we pressure the middle of the field more than we normally would....

Probably the best conditions would be if you could have a Miami (weather) in Chicago, or a dome. But that's part of it. Everybody's numbers at the end of the year in cold-weather places are going to be a lot less. That's just a part of it."

“It’s hard to hard to maintain a good, explosive leg swing when you see that the ball is not where you want it to be....

This going to be a pretty typical day from here on out. That’s kind of my takeaway, I have to make sure I’m swinging hard for the ball even if the drop’s off, and mentally you have to persevere if you hit one or two bad ones.”

"I think we expected this coming in here [Chicago]. We've had practices when I've been here where we've had just as much wind, if not more. Obviously, you can't replicate the snow, but I've been kicking in snow since I was a little kid, growing up in Virginia in the mountains. So you draw on your experience."

"I pretty much check [the weather forecast] from Monday morning on and then keep looking to see if there are any changes. But you know how it is around here. You can't really forecast that far out. So I never really believe what I see until Sunday morning....

"You can't change it -- that's kind of the attitude you need to have. You can't be scared of it. You have to go out and do what you need to do, keep your technique and not let it intimidate you. A big part of that is you can't let a bad kick get you down. You just try not to have two in a row....

In pregame one thing will happen, then during the game a different thing will happen. It can change dramatically during the game. So you almost just have to feel it out when you get out there for each kick. You hope a gust doesn't come when you let go of the ball. That's the biggest thing. The hardest thing is not the consistency of the wind, but the gusts. You hope you kick in between gusts."